I’ve tried a number of different schemes for tracking initiative in my role-playing games—notes on paper, initiative cards, simple clockwise advancement, and various software packages, commercial and free. Most that I’ve tried delivered what they offered, but none have feature sets that match exactly what I want.

Enter FightCard—a JavaScript application of my own creation that runs inside a web browser and tracks the current actor, initiative for monsters (and optionally for PCs), ready/delay states, hit points, round count, and brief notes for each combatant—and that’s about all. It’s only for managing initiative and a combatant identification during combat; it’s not a full-fledged campaign manager. But I find it useful for my GMing style, and I hope that you will, too.

By the way, FightCard supports (with tighter or looser fit) any role-playing game that organizes combats into rounds where each combatant has one turn, uses an initiative number to sequence combat rounds, and tracks combatant health using hit points or the equivalent. That describes a very large number of RPGs, including all varieties of my favorite fantasy and science fiction role-playing games

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System Requirements

FightCard runs in your web browser—and if you’re reading this, you have a web browser. FightCard runs straight from your hard drive, so you can run it whether or not you have an active Internet connection during your game. If you do have an active Internet connection available during your game, you can link individual monsters to D&D Compendium entries, if you also have a D&D Insider account.

Installing FightCard

FightCard runs from a folder on your local storage device. Download the compressed folder here, then expand it into any location you choose on your hard drive, flash drive, or other storage gizmo. The FightCard folder includes two subfolders, Campaigns and Reference. Store all your FightCard campaigns in the FightCard/Campaigns folder; store any local resources you want FightCard to display (text files with monster notes, images saved from the D&D Monster Builder, PDF character sheets, or whatever) in the FightCard/Reference folder. If you choose not to do it this way, FightCard will fail due to security precautions built into all modern browsers.

Upgrading FightCard

Note: The current version of FightCard is 1.2.

New versions of FightCard will always be released as compressed folders that include the full first-time installation package. If you are upgrading from an earlier version of FightCard, download the new version to a safe place on your hard drive, and copy only the FightCard.html file into your existing FightCard folder. Do not overwrite your Campaigns and Reference folders, or you will lose all previous data!

Adding Data to FightCard

FightCard needs encounters for you to run, and creatures (run by the GM) and characters (run by the players) to populate those encounters. You can save all those things in a campaign file.

Enter creature and character data on the Manage Creatures tab. The controls should be pretty much self-explanatory. If you’re using a creature from the D&D Compendium and you know that creature’s ID number in the Compendium database (the number after "monster.aspx?=" in a creature’s direct URL, such as 2940 for a fell taint pulsar), you can link the creature to the Compendium entry. (If you are using Safari, you can even import data from the D&D Compendium, and then save it locally.) The same holds for local files; you can link a creature to an image or PDF file stored in the Reference folder, and quickly access it in a browser window during play.

Tip:For now, the feature that imports data from the D&D Compendium (using the public D&D Compendium API) only works in Safari, not in Firefox (the two browsers I use most often). Safari is available for both Mac OS and Windows, so everybody can share the love. Even if you prefer Firefox, you might find it convenient to fire up Safari long enough to download the Compendium Data (it takes about ten minutes) and save that data in a campaign called "Monster Manual" or something like that. Then you can load that campaign into FightCard and save it with a different name to easily create a new campaign with all the Compendium monsters listed. Once you’ve finished the download-and-save process, you can switch back to Firefox—but once a month, after the Compendium is updated, you may want to run FightCard in Safari long enough to download the updates. Caution: The import-from-Compendium process can take ten or more minutes to complete, depending on your connection speed and processor speed. Be patient, and if your browser prompts you to let the script run, let it run.

Another Tip: If your creature is linked to a D&D Compendium entry or a local file, you can double-click on that creature’s name in the "Select Creature" pane to view that file.

Create encounters and add creatures to them on the Manage Encounters tab. Again, the controls’ functions should be pretty obvious. Once you’ve added a creature to an encounter, use the "Unique Marker" field to differentiate copies of the same creature. Since I use miniatures, I use the "Unique Marker" field to hold a note about which miniature represents which iteration of a creature (e.g., "kobold with spear" or "kobold with sword"). You can just leave this field blank if you prefer.

The FightCard folder "ships" with an example campaign containing six creatures (all linked to the D&D Compendium) and two encounters for you to play around with while you learn the program controls.

Once you have some creatures and encounters in your campaign, please be sure to save it! Just look for the Save … button in the upper right-hand corner. Follow the instructions for your particular browser very carefully. Then, the next time you run FightCard, you can open your saved campaign using the Choose … button. You can also visit the Preferences tab to set up a default campaign to load automatically whenever you launch FightCard.

Running Combat in FightCard

If your campaign has at least one encounter in it, you can run combat on the Manage Combat tab. You should be able to tell pretty much at a glance what all the controls do. Select an encounter in the Configure Combat pane, set the other options the way you want them, and click Begin Combat … Presto! You’re in combat. The Combat Editor lets you add more creatures, or even a whole separate encounter, while a combat is running. (For the moment, however, don’t try to go add a whole new creature on the fly—the Manage Combat pane will forget what it was doing. I’ll try to fix that in a future release.)

One More Tip: When FightCard sorts combatants, it uses their initiative modifiers to break ties. Thus, a creature with an initiative modifier of +4 who rolls 16 on the initiative die (assuming 1d20) has an initiative of 20 and a first tie-breaker of 4, so it would go before a creature that rolled 17 and has an initiative value of +3, again for a total of 20. You can also sneak in a second tie-breaker by entering the initiative modifier as a decimal number, with your second tie-breaker after the decimal. For example, when entering a creature with a Dexterity of 17 and an initiative modifier of +3, you could enter "3.17" for the initiative modifier. If this creature rolled 17 on its initiative roll, it would act ahead of a creature with 16 Dex whose initiative modifier was entered as "3.16." Or you can enter all PC initiative modifiers with an extra .1 added on if you want to ensure that PCs always act before monsters with the same initiative count.

Known Bugs/Issues

If you import creatures from another FightCard campaign file, FightCard might not enable the "Save …" button properly. If you encounter this problem, just use the "Rename …" button to change the campaign name (you don’t actually have to change the name; just using the "Rename …" feature will trigger FightCard to turn on the "Save …" button).

As I mentioned before, the import-from-Compendium features only work in Safari (and, of course, only if you’re logged into the Compendium).

I have only tested FightCard with Safari on Mac OS X, and Firefox on both Mac OS X and Windows. I don’t care a handful of beans about making the app IE compatible, and I haven’t tried out other browsers like Opera, Camino, or iCab.

Technical Support and Feature Requests

I’m only an amateur programmer with a more-than-full-time job as a college professor. I can really only devote enough effort to FightCard to keep it running smoothly for my own games. Even so, I’ll try to answer any questions you might have, and I certainly want to hear about any problems that I might be able to fix at the code level. You’re also welcome to dig in and improve the code yourself, as long as you share-alike, distribute the code freely and openly, and don’t try to make money off it. To state that more formally, Fight Card is ©2009 Christopher Heard and released to the public under the GNU General Public License 2.0. Any trademarked names or terms mentioned in the application or documentation remain the property of their respective trademark holders.

If you do have comments, questions, feature requests, and so on, please leave them as comments on this page.